Archive for wonder

Skyline punctured by silhouettes
Tiny holes of nothing wheeling, diving
Carving strange and wonderful curves
Patches of night in bird shapes
Defying the rising sun
Left behind are the weight of thought or memory
Wingtips trailing feathery clouds
Inky fingering postscripts along the horizon
Treatises upon the marvel and freedom
Of bodies suspended upon oceans of clear air.

The rain is falling like tears broken open by a sieve
So fine that it looks as though the street lamps
Are bleeding strands of gold
Something magical pouring out of
An otherwise ordinary night
A little bit of wonder obtruding
Upon the drab skirts of life.

So gold drips onto my lips,
Moistening parched, cracked skin,
I’ve been speaking you poems for days
Breathless into the dark,
Tongue unreeling slow soft hymns
Out of your name and the secrets behind your smile
Because that is the purpose it learned
When you put your “I love you” upon it.

Now, all my speech tastes of you,
My breath conjures your shape out of moonlight
I have become this mad fool singing in the rain
Confounded by newfound joy
A fresh, new drunkard drinking deep
From the honey you poor down upon
Such impoverished souls as mine.

Here there be magic, here there be marvelsDark and wondrous strangeHarvests of dreamsRiding smokey currentsReaped as the earth is reachingFor her downy white coverletCatlike yawning steam coiling.

More than spring’s spritely urgencyDeeper than summer’s languorMarking the border betweenWaking and winter’s long slumberLays October’s countryThe shivery bittersweet tasteOf mortality, where the lines blur.

When I was a boy
The clouds were dragons, vast, mighty
With the night gathering beneath their wings
Their purple blue orange gold red flaming breath
Carving the sunset out of the midnight lapis horizon
Turning trees and mountains and houses
Into the black shadows of themselves,
Theater scenery backdrops
Setting the stage for new dreams.

I’ve never encountered an average city street
Even by daylight I can always find the strangeness
The rumble beneath the grating
Isn’t the subway, it is breathing
Chthonic stentorian snorts and gasps
Rattling windows that sometimes reflect
Showers of sparks from nowhere
That settle upon the hair and eyelashes
Of all the girls and boys
Revealing the princes and princesses
Whichever they might be.

I’ve followed streams that were the trench dug
By giant’s clubs as they climbed back to the heights
Fee fi foe fumming, bending the trees like blades of grass
I’ve seen the thrones of trolls
Scattered about with the bleached stoney bones of their foes
Watched as a nymph winked at me when she was a badger
Walked alone through vast throngs
Of fair folk and fine, dancing to their tunes
(Though not for a hundred years, for I know the steps
And the trick of them)
Drunk upon a thousand and one tales.

See, I kept the glasses, kept them secret, kept them safe
Most get lost or worse still cracked
The lenses fixed upon youth’s eyes in the beginning
The visions of castles and caves of wonders,
Boxes that hold songs, even whole worlds
Soon fade, become forgotten, or skewed and horrible,
Twisting minds and bodies
Into shapes of rage and terror and hate
Always be wary of the broken ones
Wary, but help them see right and true again if you can
Remember, the helpful will in their turn be helped
It says so in the faerie tales and they never lie.

I haven’t done one of these prose poetry stream of consciousness things in a long time and I thought one was due. It is also a little bit if my own process given a bit of verbal grandeur. Enjoy all, and cheers.

I find myself dwelling in the spaces between things. Each and every moment is in and of itself a concrete thing but my mind obsesses over the pauses, the transitions, the strange gaps between. I am mindful of them, I see them connecting all the comings and goings until my vision is clouded by smeared webs, a constant extending time lapse photograph capturing the changes. I like to play the pauses, try to hear what sits in the middle of breath. It’s these places were the strange and the everyday collide, the unmarked blanks in the constantly unfolding geography of life where “here be dragons”. All of the secret things whisper to me from the cracks, show their magic, where the dreams collect and nightmares pool between the raindrops.
I try to capture this weirdness, describe the ghosts in the candle flame flicker, articulate the landscapes of oddness I see unfolding from the folds and wrinkles. Focus always seems to be on the action or the aftermath yet my eyes are looking for the invisible, not the death or the dying even but the pin point turning, not conception or birth but the bridge spanning the divide built from all the shifting, roiling energy glowing in the one instant that marks the absence of on or the other.
I’m always fumbling for those words that can pin down the weirdness I see all around, the sudden showers of sparks, inexplicable chills, the rustlings, impossible angles, my lips dripping ink. There are bits and pieces falling in windrow drifts from my fingertips, dusting a patina of wonder over plain breakfast table cups of coffee, tilting the picture contrast tint saturation of a million comfortable, safe, familiar conversations or walks down the lane, altering the perspectives to include all of the vast void between now and then, here and there, cataloguing the nothing brim overflowing the nowhere of everywhere. Even awake I dream as my eyes alight on the seams splitting open, mundanity splitting like a ripe peach between my thumbs, spilling rich juices to reveal the seed of all impossible possibilities beneath the flesh.

Skirts flicker through green gold shadow
Promises of adventure
Down each and every twisting path
Every hill a mountaintop
Faeries tucked away in the bells of flowers
Dragons lair in steam vents
Grumble snoring dreaming
Waiting to be wakened
To go flying off into the blue.

To see the world
Born new each morning
Unfolding bright and full of secret wonder
Begging to be explored
Yearning with tales, bursting at the seems
With monsters and magic
Enough princes and princesses for all the happy
Endlessly possible never ending endings
What sublime joy exists
In un dimmed eyes.

My daughters teach me lessons
How small stones are jewels
Whole worlds can be made
From pavements and chalk
Mermaids can fly if you want them to
While unicorns play tag with the shore
Running atop the wild white plumed waves
They make me remember to forget
House payments and other such drudgery
Wiping from my eyes all the dust and drear
So that occasionally I can see
The flicker flash of glass
As their feet take them off and away
Down yellow brick roads.

emisformake
The blog of my sissy-poo and the person responsible for me creating my own blog…so you can all blame her and while you’re at it check out her fantastically insane levels of creativity and talent